Also, why can’t videos use torrent technology to serve the data by other viewers?
from what i read, they do.
i think the problem is the kind of distributed systems it was designed to be vs the kind we are talking about.
PT won’t be, at the current state of propagation of content, redundancy and accessibility of content, a replacement for YT or similar.
it could be, but today it cannot.
there is another post mentioning how if certain Lemmy instances keep growing they’ll need economic support.
it smells PT, the way it’s organised today, needs support right now.
there are various ways to optimise data propagation and replication for scalability of content.
I think the discussion needs to be open towards this question
one reason which come to mind is Stream-ability.
if you download the video and play it, it might be fine. but users normally want to stream it.
to stream it, the endpoint from where you stream it needs to be near you.
if you are in the US and will stream something from a European server, you’ll have problems. and even if you don’t, that cannot be considered the norm.
that’s why people use CDNs, and they are a huge business.
so there’s an advantage to have a close to you instance, which has as much locally present content as possible